Barcelona Day 4

Catalonia (Barcelona’s province) is extremely political and has a very long history of unsuccessfully trying to gain independence from Spain. When I was trying to set up last night’s dinner with my two Catalonian friends Helena and Robert, Helena asked me “Robert es independista?”, suggesting that if he weren’t in favor of independence, it might cause her to reconsider the whole idea of us getting together – kind of like trying to match people in the US and having one of them ask how the other feels about Trump.

Anyway, I seem to always show up here just before a big election, but this trip I am here between two big elections. The first one, the Catalonia one, just happened last week and the pro-independence party lost. The next one for the European Parliament is coming later this week and the general feeling is that the right wing will sweep all the contests (welcome to our world, Spain). The poster at right is for Partido Popular (the bad guys). So everyone here is a little sad. 

Except for this guy, who did kind of what I did today and just zoned out, read a book, drank some wine and washed clothes with the mango and aloe hand soap in my bathroom. Except that probably only I did that last thing.

I have one more day here before I hit the proverbial road and head to Portugal to start my bike trip (which will end in Santiago de Compostela, which I can’t wait to write about because like so many religious origin stories, this one is extremely plausible). So tomorrow I plan to go to the beach, do some more reading, walk around in clothes smelling delightfully of mango and aloe, eat some tapas, and pack.

As a side note, it’s so nice that the people here are so willing to accommodate non-Spanish speakers.